OMG, too difficult to even begin to mess with, why not include a easy to use mail program, the people running these things arent running corperations, they just wanna send mail out for their forums, kinda went overboard on the mail server guys lol, no offence i like that u guys went all out, but just to much to mess with for a small time operation is all

well first off id like to just send mail out from my boards without having to get smpt service from my isp and installing 15 different things to do it, without having to setup 15 different things inside of mercury mail, without pulling my hair out cus even tho i followed the instructions step-by-step it still doesnt seem to wanna work, get frustrated, clustered, aggravated, and finally fed up enuff to shut it down and say the hell with it, just to send a simple piece of mail from my boards that after hours of trying to get it to send i dont even get to send the damned piece of mail . . . . .

its lenghty enuff to set up the boards and make sure the apache is gonna show images correctly, and after countless fiasco's trying to get help and all my posts not getting answer [of course except with "it's too long"] it leaves one to stop and wonder if it would be waste of time to go post his/her problem about anything that comes in this package, obviously its just as a pain in the ass to the developers, cus they cant even read a long post to help a potential user, so it would make sence to just include an easy mail system with the package or leave sumthing in the release notes that gives them an alternative to what comes with it.

and excuse me for sounding so uneducated, but does it absolutly have to be "open source"? isn't functionality enuff to serve the purpose, or must you have to have it be open source to put into the package? im not the smartest guy on the net by far, but i do know that there is a way to include a free mail server that isnt open source and have it still work with the package correctly, hell i would even go for just including another install file that i have to install that comes with the package.

please dont get me wrong here, the package is exellent, the best. the support has left a bad taste in my mouth and i doubt i'll be coming back to get any of that unless somehow i am forced to do so, but every other thing about the package is priceless to me and everyother user, EXCEPT for that huge mail program, and dont get me wrong with that either, i am sure the mail program is worthy enuff to be in this package. all i am saying is that [and this is an assumption but id put my money on it ] very few ppl will be using this package for a mass production, as a matter of fact i believe ur TOS stipulates that you suggest NOT to use it for production . . . . . .

JusticeIsDead wrote:well first off id like to just send mail out from my boards without having to get smpt service from my isp and installing 15 different things to do it, without having to setup 15 different things inside of mercury mail, without pulling my hair out cus even tho i followed the instructions step-by-step it still doesnt seem to wanna work, get frustrated, clustered, aggravated, and finally fed up enuff to shut it down and say the hell with it, just to send a simple piece of mail from my boards that after hours of trying to get it to send i dont even get to send the damned piece of mail . . . . .

There isn't much to set up Mercury to send mail, actually. Install it with MercuryS SMTP server, and set your php.ini to point to localhost. It'd be a good idea to turn off relaying and whitelist 127.0.0.1, or just not route incoming connections on port 25, but a standard, vanilla installation will send out email. My thought at this point is that either you have something misconfigured in php.ini, which can be tricky to set working right on Windows, or that your ISP is blocking outgoing port 25 traffic except to their mail server.

Dig out the [mail function] section of your php.ini file and post it. php.ini will be in the Windows directory (or Winnnt for NT 4 and maybe 2000). You could also try installing Mercury with MercuryC SMTP Client to relay through your ISP's mail server. If they are blocking port 25, that is probably your only option, regardless of what mail server package you use.

JusticeIsDead wrote:its lenghty enuff to set up the boards and make sure the apache is gonna show images correctly, and after countless fiasco's trying to get help and all my posts not getting answer [of course except with "it's too long"]

It can be difficult to dig through a post with a lot of commentary for little actual issues.

JusticeIsDead wrote: it leaves one to stop and wonder if it would be waste of time to go post his/her problem about anything that comes in this package, obviously its just as a pain in the ass to the developers, cus they cant even read a long post to help a potential user, so it would make sence to just include an easy mail system with the package or leave sumthing in the release notes that gives them an alternative to what comes with it.

Trust me, Mercury is an easy mail system for Windows. I've looked at a number of them, and none is as versitile, stable and easy to run without spending hundreds of bucks.

JusticeIsDead wrote:and excuse me for sounding so uneducated,

The only way to learn is to ask.

JusticeIsDead wrote:but does it absolutly have to be "open source"?

Er, Mercury isn't open source. It's free as in beer - David Harris doesn't charge you for it - but it's not free as in speech - he doesn't share the source code at all, for free or for money.

JusticeIsDead wrote:isn't functionality enuff to serve the purpose, or must you have to have it be open source to put into the package? im not the smartest guy on the net by far, but i do know that there is a way to include a free mail server that isnt open source and have it still work with the package correctly, hell i would even go for just including another install file that i have to install that comes with the package.

I suspect that Mercury would be easier to integrate seamlessly if it were open source, but it's not. It is, however, the best free mail server around for Windows. I'm getting the impression that you don't have much experience in running any sort of mail server, and that the problem might be more that you don't know what all the various options mean and do than that they don't do them right. If I'm right, say so, and I'll see if I can give you more detailed instructions.

JusticeIsDead wrote:please dont get me wrong here, the package is exellent, the best. the support has left a bad taste in my mouth and i doubt i'll be coming back to get any of that unless somehow i am forced to do so, but every other thing about the package is priceless to me and everyother user, EXCEPT for that huge mail program,

Er, compared to most Windows mail servers, Mercury is tiny. Both in terms of drive space and footprint in memory and system resources.

To be blunt, it's hard to help you because you're not giving a lot of information about what's wrong. I'm guessing that's because you don't have enough experience with mail servers to know what questions to ask, or what information to present, and the only way to learn is to ask. The developers are, apparently, busy enough that they can't always answer, but the point of a forum is for other users, like me, to help. I know Mercury and Windows pretty well, and enough about Apache, and PHP, to get stuff working.

What, exactly, happens when you try to send email through Mercury? Do you get an error message of some sort? What PHP scripting are you using that's not working? Another thought is that most scripting defaults to being set up for Linux/Unix php settings, which assume Sendmail functions that aren't available for Windows. You might need to change some settings in the board set up to account for that. Look for email settings that refer to "sendmail" or "smtp." For a Windows based system, php must send via smtp. Sendmail is for *nix machines only.

JusticeIsDead wrote: and dont get me wrong with that either, i am sure the mail program is worthy enuff to be in this package. all i am saying is that [and this is an assumption but id put my money on it ] very few ppl will be using this package for a mass production, as a matter of fact i believe ur TOS stipulates that you suggest NOT to use it for production . . . . . .

Xampp uses Apache 2, generally (from what I can tell) the current stable build. The people who created and maintain Apache do not recommend Apache 2 for production use, as it is still fairly young, and they are still ironing out all the bugs. In particular, they do not recommend using Apache 2, with PHP and MySQL, or with SSL encryption, in a production environment. Many believe they are overly cautious on that, but it's quite sensible for Xampp folks to include that recommendation. I wouldn't recommend it if there's much at stake, especially much money. But I'll be using it for my own web site (which is commercial, but on a very small scale) as soon as I get the updates done. Only you can make the judgement call on whether it's worth the risk of using less than proven software on your web site(s).

I already tried that, but if i only use localhost.It keeps giving me the error message.if i use postmaster@localhost it gives me a blank page...

Is it something in mercury mail i need to adjust or in some php files??

Thanx

What error message does it give? That is the correct setting - localhost only - works fine for me. I'm guessing that there's something wrong with the way it's talking to Mercury. You might also try setting session logging in Mercury, to see exactly what's happening. But start with the error message you get with the correct settings.

i dont know anything about a mail serve to be completly honest, i just want to send mail from my boards, i dont want every user having a mail box or any of that crap, i just want it to send out mail, thats it.

i would rather not involve my isp in this at all, the less they know the better off i'll be, they'll wanna get all into stuff and mess it all up where im at, buncha noobs with a cable company.

i found a tutorial on hw to set up the mail server and it seems to want me to input a smpt address or what ever from my isp, and i dont even know if they have one, much less wanna use it for anything, but like i said all i wanna do is send mail from my forums. they are IPB 1.3